


Place Your Past Into A Book

by branwyn



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Depression, Ghosts, Haunted House, M/M, Past Child Abuse, Past Torture, Pining, Suicidal Thoughts, Supernatural - Freeform, Trauma Recovery
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-01
Updated: 2016-04-05
Packaged: 2018-05-30 15:30:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6430147
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/branwyn/pseuds/branwyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Four months ago, Bruce left New York and got captured by Ross’s men. Tony rescued him and brought him home to recover—not to the Tower, but to Stark Mansion, where Tony lived as a boy. But there are supernatural forces in the old house that not even superheroes are equipped to fight.</p><p>In progress; updates every two or three days. Rating, warnings, and tags subject to change.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

“Here we go: home sweet home. It’s, you know, neither of those things, but whatever.”

Tony gives the bottom of the door a little kick and strides in like he owns the place. Which, he does. Technically.

Behind him, Bruce Banner stands under the shadow of the portico, hesitant, like he’s uncertain what awaits him inside.

“Stark Mansion is the most valuable piece of abandoned real estate in Manhattan. I didn’t make that up, there was a Forbes article. Howard liked it, but the place is a dust trap.” Illustrating, Tony runs a finger along the polished wooden table in the center of the massive foyer, the one that always held an equally massive flower arrangement in his mother’s time. It comes up clean, of course. The cleaners had been in that morning. 

He relaxes when the door finally clicks shut. Tony turns to Bruce with a carefully measured smile: encouraging, not too bright. 

“Do you wanna…” He tilts his head, then gestures toward Bruce’s luggage. “Here, let me get that.”

Bruce blinks, then looks at the beaten up duffle bag he’s carrying like he’d forgotten it was there. It’s the same bag he had with him that first day they met on the helicarrier, the one he toted with him from Kolkata. He surrenders it to Tony, then goes back to staring into the unlit depths of the mansion. 

It’s the same thousand yard stare he was wearing three weeks ago when Tony, Clint, and Natasha busted him out of Ross’s secret research bunker in the Nevada desert. 

Tony still doesn’t know exactly what Ross’s people did to him. He could make some intelligent guesses, working backwards from all the new flinch reflexes Bruce has picked up, but Bruce isn’t volunteering the details, and Tony isn’t enough of an asshole to ask. 

Or to say _I told you so_ , even though he had, back in January, when Bruce had bailed on him and left New York. Again. 

Honest to God, Tony had no idea that he even possessed such a thing as self-control until he met Banner. He can count his real friends, the ones who know him inside out, on one hand with fingers left over. But the thing about Rhodey, Pepper, and Happy, is that they all take care of _him_. Tony takes care of them too, but not—not like this. Not by being _sensitive_.

You wouldn’t know it to look at him, hopefully, but Tony is busting his ass, trying to keep his feelings out of his face. Either Bruce wouldn’t notice, which would be one level of worrying, or he would, and then he’d start putting on a show of how fine he was, and that—Tony couldn’t stand that.

He’s not denying that Bruce Banner is a master class in self-sufficiency, but he is not fucking _fine_.

“You know, a lesser man might be jealous of the fact that this pile of bricks gets your awed silence, when I distinctly remember that the sum total of your reaction when you saw the Tower was, ‘Nice, Tony.’” He says the last two words in an exaggerated version of Bruce’s soft tenor. 

When Bruce doesn’t react to the mockery, Tony’s nerves finally get the better of him. He steps forward and waves a hand in front of Bruce’s face. “Yeah, okay, this is spooky. From now on, we go through the tradesman’s entrance. It’ll be easier on your prole sensibilities.”

“What?” Bruce blinks. “Oh, sorry. This is…” 

Bruce’s gaze finally lights on an object. He’s studying one of the massive bay windows; or more likely, knowing him, he’s studying the sunlight streaming through the glass, watching the dust motes that dance in the beams.

When he looks at Tony, it’s all Tony can do not to catch his breath, because Bruce is _present_ suddenly, in a way he hasn’t been since the rescue. 

“You really grew up here?” he says, his tone mild.

The trouble with Bruce is that when he bothers to look, he sees too fucking much.

“What, I’m not classy enough for the joint, is that what you’re saying?” Bruce’s features crumple with the start of an apology, and Tony waves him off. “No, you’re right. Mostly I hung out in Jarvis’s part of the house. I never got the point of foyers. What kind of word is that anyway. Doesn’t even sound like English. You want the tour?” Tony looks up the dark staircase that leads to the second floor bedrooms and winces. “Never mind, plenty of time for that later. You want to sleep upstairs or—yeah, no, you’d hate it there. C’mon.”

Tony catches Bruce by the elbow and tugs him gently through an unobtrusive door next to the cloak room. It opens on the gallery, but they pass through without stopping to gawk at the artwork. It’s his mom’s collection, all Romantic nineteenth century landscapes. Snoozefest. Tony’s collection is back at the Tower. 

The next door leads them into the one part of the house that looks and feels like an actual home. There’s a short hallway with a bedroom suite on one side and bathrooms opposite. Rounding the corner leads you into a spacious kitchen with a pantry in the back. There’s also a side entrance to the house that opens onto 70th, and a door in the back that leads to the kitchen garden. 

A lot of people Tony knows would take offense at being stowed away in the butler’s quarters, but he doubts Bruce has even noticed. Which is a good thing. Not because he’d be offended, but because he doesn’t want Bruce thinking too hard about _why_ Tony’s put him in Jarvis’s old rooms. 

He detours into the bedroom suite just long enough to deposit Bruce’s bag on the bed and open a couple of windows. Then he strides into the kitchen and checks the fridge.

“Groceries get delivered? Okay, yeah, good. I’ll make us omelets later.”

Bruce huffs a tiny, delicate laugh. Tony whirls on him, and Bruce spreads his hands. “I’ve heard about your omelets,” he says.

Tony tries to look like he’s joining in on the joke, and not like he’s fucking delighted by the fact that this is the first time he’s heard Bruce laugh in about a month.

“My omelets are a life-changing experience.” Tony braces his hands against the marble countertop of the kitchen island and hoists himself up, like he’s done a million times before. Like he’s ten again. He’s amazed he didn’t leave a butt groove here as a kid. “So what do you want to do? Watch a movie, play some Mario Kart, slide down the banisters?”

Bruce leans his back against the wall and starts polishing his glasses on his shirt. “I, ah. I’m a little tired, to be honest.”

Tony was expecting that, more or less. “Okay, sure. Have a nap. I’ll just…yeah, I’ll figure something out. Always shit to take care of.”

Bruce ducks his head in a nod. He looks back towards the bedroom, but he doesn’t move. “Tony. I appreciate this—the privacy, the down time—but you, you don’t have to stay here. With me.”

Tony doesn’t hesitate. “Rude,” he says, waiting for Bruce to look at him again before jabbing a finger in his direction. “Guests I have invited to my family home do not get to kick me out again. That was Howard’s job, and he’s not here.”

Bruce doesn’t react to the attempted joke, or its slightly-more-revealing-than-he-meant-it-to-be coda. “I mean it. I don’t need a babysitter, and you, you’ve already done…I mean, you got me out of…”

“Gonna stop you there. Gratitude is absurdly awkward on you. Spare us both.”

Bruce rolls his eyes. “You can’t actually order me not to be grateful.”

“But I can talk over you at increasing speed and volume until you shut the hell up. Feelings and bodily organs, Banner: fine on the inside, gross and disturbing on the outside. You want something to eat before you crash? Tea? I forgot what kind of tea you liked, so I got…all of them, I think.” Tony jumps down and opens a cabinet at random. “Yeah, looks like all of them.”

“No. I’m good, thanks.”

The outrageous obviousness of that lie practically demands a snarky comment in return, but Tony swallows it. He didn’t bring Bruce here to make him feel more exposed. 

“Then I’ll leave you to your beauty sleep. If you can’t find me when you wake up, just knock over an urn or something.”

Bruce nods and puts his glasses back on. Then he walks into Jarvis’s bedroom and shuts the door behind him. Tony watches for a minute; the light doesn’t come on. 

For the first time since he picked Bruce up at the hospital that morning, Tony is alone. He gives into the pressure building inside him just long enough to scrub his hands over his face and exhale against his palms.

Bringing Bruce back here, instead of to the Tower, was the right call. Pepper had signed off on it when he’d run the idea past her, and Pepper is always right about this stuff, so he’s not going to second-guess it now. 

The Tower is his home, his baby even, but it’s also home to Stark Industries’ corporate headquarters, not to mention the de facto headquarters for the Avengers. It isn’t the kind of place you go to get away from it all—kind of the opposite, really.

Plus, apart from Tony and Natasha, Bruce hadn’t wanted visitors at the hospital, which virtually guaranteed they’d be lined up waiting for him at the Tower. And Bruce is in no shape to police his own boundaries right now. The guy is a shadow. A slightly more substantial shadow than when Tony melted the locks on his cage and found him curled up naked on the concrete floor, but that was because Natasha had spent the last three weeks threatening to force-feed him if he didn’t choke down the hospital food. He’s still walking around like a man in a dream. Like Ross built a cage in his head that no armor can help Tony bust him out of.

It sucks. Not for Bruce, although obviously it sucks for Bruce, but at least he can do what he wants now. Tony, on the other hand, is trapped. And there was Bruce, with his _“You don’t have to stay here”_ crap. Hilarious. Smartest man in the world (more or less), and he thinks Tony’s here because he wants to be? Sure. Because Tony’s the guy who steps up to soothe invalids with his calm and caring bedside manner. 

Tony sits there a minute or two, listening to the gentle hum of the kitchen appliances, straining his ears for any sounds of distress from the bedroom. That’s when he hears it: footsteps on the other side of the far wall, falling against the carpet in the gallery. 

Since Afghanistan, Tony’s fight-or-flight response is pretty much stuck on the “fight” button, but he goes completely still. Even his breathing slows. 

The cleaning staff came in this morning, but they cleared out hours ago. 

And it’s not Natasha, because she left on an assignment last night, and it’s not Clint, because…it’s not Clint. Thor is off-world. Steve, last he checked, was in D.C., and anyway, he’d think it was rude not to knock. Ditto Pepper.

The thing is, Tony spent the first twelve years of his life listening to footsteps in this house. He’s heard these same light footfalls before, knows how they barely disturb the vacuum cleaner tracks on the carpet.

Slowly, Tony walks out of the kitchen and comes to face the door that leads out of Jarvis’s quarters into the gallery. He stands there, staring, listening, waiting, until his ears are ringing with nothing but an echoing silence. 

The thing is, Tony hates this fucking house. He’s here for one reason and one reason only: because he has to be. Because at some point over the last year, he’d involuntarily hitched the fragile fucking organism that passes for his peace of mind to Bruce Banner’s security and happiness. And then Bruce had fucking run away, where Tony couldn’t protect him, so of course Tony had to chase after him and pick up the pieces. 

They’re here in this house, not because Bruce needs peace and quiet to recover, but because Tony needs to be somewhere no one can walk in on him at the wrong moment and witness him slowly cracking up.

The thing is, being stuck in this house when he’s loving-thinking-feeling-being _everything_ for a guy who shuts doors in his face—it’s just a little too much like being ten years old again for Tony’s liking.

On the other hand, it’s the best excuse he’s had for getting plastered in a long time.

Tony walks back into the kitchen and digs around in the freezer until he finds the ice trays. Loading up a glass, he sets off for the library. The bottle of scotch he hid behind the old family Bible when he was fourteen is probably still there. 

As he steps through the door into the gallery, he feels something brush past him. A draft, obviously. He’d asked the cleaners to leave a couple of windows open, to air the dust out. But it makes the hair stands up along his arms. 

Fuck it, he’s going to need an entire case of scotch. Time to schedule more deliveries.


	2. Chapter 2

Bruce sits on the edge of the bed in a slowly darkening room and stares at nothing in particular.

It’s a nice room. Not exactly what he expected from Stark Mansion, but more inviting than the ostentatious grandeur of the foyer, with its echoing cathedral ceiling. Like the rest of the house, this room has been uninhabited for years, but there are lingering traces in the decor of the refined, tasteful intelligence that once called it home. 

It doesn’t make him feel anything, but he can’t help making observations. 

He can see why Tony brought him here. The mansion has a quieter energy than the Tower, even if the twelve foot high walls surrounding the grounds can’t entirely muffle the noise of the city. The quiet is…not pleasant, but wholesome. Like plain oatmeal. The sort of thing you’d spoon-feed an invalid. Bruce wouldn’t have picked it for himself, but it was easier to let Tony do what he wanted. All the fight in him had been used up long before Tony took him out of Ross’s cell. 

Otherwise, he probably would have made Tony leave him there.

Once upon a time, he’d sworn to himself that he would do anything rather than let Ross get his hands on him again. Anything.

Of all the bitter realities Bruce has had to face since the accident, this is the one he’s denied the longest: no matter how much energy he puts into hating himself, his self-preservation instincts are too strong to crush completely. 

When he wakes up after a transformation, his first question, the one he asks himself as soon as consciousness begins to dawn, is _where am I?_ It takes a little while before he’s clear-headed enough to talk, and by then he’s remembered that the question he should be asking is _how many people did I hurt?_

If he were the good man his teammates insist he is, those questions would probably occur to him in reverse order. 

Bruce is a coward; that’s the problem. If he were really serious about keeping himself and the Hulk out of Ross’s hands, there are options. Drug combinations that would reduce him to a husk. Induced comas. Live burial under layers of adamantium and concrete. But he keeps looking for—something else. Some magical alternative where he gets everything he wants and doesn’t have to sacrifice anything in return.

Tony thinks he keeps leaving New York because he’s trying to do some kind of penance. Tony doesn’t know him nearly as well as he thinks he does.

Self-preservation created the Hulk. Bruce _knows_ that if he could just clamp down hard enough on that part of himself, the Hulk could be unmade. 

He used to fantasize about traveling back in time, to before the experiment. Persuading himself to abandon the project. He knows now, it wouldn’t have been enough. There would have been another project. Because Bruce’s problem is that he knows everything, but he never _learns_.

Given the choice to alter his past now, he’d go back to that empty school basement when he was sixteen. Make sure the bomb went off this time. Clean, instant death. Before anyone was hurt, before he had anything to regret.

A gust of warm wind rushes through the window. The curtains billow, and Bruce remembers that spring had arrived while he was locked away in the dark. The last time he was in New York, it was January. 

He used to love this time of year, when the weather was just turning warm. Something inside him always uncoils and puts out its feelers towards the sun when the days start to lengthen. 

In that magical, impossible alternate existence he sometimes fantasizes about, the one where his body is his own and his mind is a tame beast, he keeps a garden. He grows food and medicinal herbs there. And in a secret, unlabeled plot, poisons. 

The fact is, it isn’t his body he needs to kill. It’s that pilot light of hope flickering at the back of his head. The rest would follow logically.

He probably needs to spend less time with Tony.

He needs to leave Tony, for good this time. Before he wrecks him. Before he actually succeeds in proving to him that redemption is a fool’s dream. Just because it’s true for Bruce doesn’t mean Tony would be better off believing in nothing.

If he walks away from Tony again at this point, he might as well present himself to Ross in a package complete with a bow. He can’t run the way he used to anymore, never stopping. He’s tired. Getting older.

What if…

If he did leave. If he went back to Ross and made a deal. Bruce’s cooperation, in exchange for an acceptable measure of autonomy. Negotiated limits on the types and uses of research he participates in. Harm reduction.

The problem is that Ross doesn’t consider Bruce human. Doesn’t recognize his right to set limits. Considers him property.

_What is the difference between being dead and being property?_

A thought experiment. Posit that Bruce would commit suicide if it were possible for him to die. 

If his life is so worthless to him, why not hand it over to someone who wants it? Why cling to autonomy? Like anything good comes out of his thinking for himself.

He doesn’t want to be captured again. But maybe if he just…surrenders. 

Just a thought. It might even be restful.

_No, it wouldn’t be restful. It would hurt._

Yes, he is still motivated to avoid pain. Like an animal. All reaction, no intention.

_The heart asks pleasure first,_  
And then, excuse from pain;   
And then, those little anodynes   
That deaden suffering; 

_And then, to go to sleep;_  
And then, if it should be   
The will of its Inquisitor,   
The liberty to die. 

He was a fan of poetry once. Rather, she had liked poetry, and Bruce had loved whatever she loved automatically. She had liked animals too. And children.

In Brazil, he’d had a dog. Yellow, skinny, less dirty than you’d expect from a homeless mutt. 

Bruce never did give her a name. He hadn’t been looking for a pet. Couldn’t take the risk of getting attached to something alive, something that would need him. But he’d chased off a couple of boys throwing rocks at her, given her part of his dinner, and she’d adopted him. 

She’d saved him from Blonsky, and he’d abandoned her. He doesn’t even know if she’d lived through the raid. If she did, she’d probably starved to death, waiting for him to come back.

No, Bruce isn’t an animal. (He’s never understood loyalty as a concept. That probably had something to do with his father.) He is a brilliant man. Cruelty requires intelligence. 

His father had been a brilliant man too. And a monster. But he had only ever killed one person. Bruce has surpassed him in every possible way. Not even Tony could disagree with that.

Tony…

What is Tony doing, alone in this big, empty house? He’d never been happy here. Even Bruce can see that.

Bruce has been sitting here too long. The room is darker now. In New York there are too many buildings; you can’t read the time of day by the color of the light in the same way. 

Slowly, he stands up, pulling against muscles that are tight in some places, weak in others. He smells like he hasn’t showered. He hasn’t felt hungry since the third day after Ross stopped feeding him, but the fact that he’s lightheaded means he should probably eat.

When he’d first sat down, he’d deliberately turned his back to the mirror over the dresser. So when he feels a prickling at the back of his neck, like he’s being watched, he ignores it. The older he gets, the more he looks like his father, the more he avoids mirrors. 

A week after Ross stopped feeding him, Bruce had started hallucinating. Frightening things, sometimes. Random shapes and movements more often. And then there was the pareidolia, seeing patterns in nothingness. Side effect of sensory deprivation.

His senses aren’t deprived now, and the feeling that he’s being watched is only getting stronger. It takes incredible effort to make himself turn around and peer into the shadows behind him. 

Nothing. Of course, there’s nothing. One corner of the room is slightly darker than the others. 

If he can’t eat, he should drink. Easy to get dehydrated while fasting. Tea, with milk and sugar: not the way he likes it, but a solution to his problem. Also a monumental effort. He should have let Tony make it for him when he offered.

The longer he looks into the darkest corner of the room, the more the shadow seems to take on form. A humanoid outline, detached from the shadows around it.

Tea. And a shower, he hadn’t much bothered at the hospital. 

Maybe he’ll lie down instead.

The mattress feels new. Memory foam, firm and yielding at the same time. He takes off his glasses, sets them on the nightstand. Stares up at the ceiling, then shuts his eyes. The sensation of being watched doesn’t go away. 

It doesn’t mean anything. He doesn’t care if it means anything. He doesn’t care.

*

Bruce opens his eyes. Something is wrong.

He hasn’t slept long enough to feel rested, but that’s normal.

He should get up. He wants to get up. He doesn’t move.

The bed is large, much larger than necessary for one person, and he’s lying in the middle of it. As he breathes in and out, he feels a presence standing over him. 

It isn’t Tony, who smells of warm metal, engine oil, whiskey. 

It isn’t Tony.

Parallel to his head, out of his periphery, it sinks down onto the bed. Not touching, but close enough that Bruce can feel the mattress depressing under its weight.

The room is dark. Not night time, but after sunset. By the light of the window he can see into the corners, where the shadows had been deepest before he lay down. They’re not dark anymore.

Only when he begins to hear the rough, shallow breathing of the thing in the bed with him does Bruce realize that he cannot move. There is a rustling sound, something dragging along the bedsheets, inching towards his face.

His chest rises and falls but otherwise _he cannot move_.

Hot, sour breath against his cheek. A chuckle, low in his ear.

_“He’s here.”_ Whispered so close that the down on his cheeks stirs. _“I’ll go let him in.”_

Across the room, a thin seam of light appears as the door swings slowly open.


	3. Chapter 3

In a surprisingly comfortable patio chair positioned just off the pantry door, Tony is coordinating order and delivery specs with JARVIS over his StarkPad. The weather’s great, in that sweet spot between “why the fuck is it snowing on Easter Sunday” and “dear God, surely we’re not supposed to have hundred degree days until June at least”. And here he is, hanging out in the _garden_. Just shove him into a pair of loafers and fuck him up the ass with a croquet mallet.

JARVIS is networked with the mansion computers, obviously, because Tony is no longer capable of dealing with less efficient systems, but JARVIS operates security, deliveries, whatever else, remotely from the Tower. For some reason, Tony’s never actually activated him here on the house servers. It would be simpler all around if he just…did that. But he hasn’t.

Maybe it’s because this was Jarvis’s turf. Maybe in some superstitious corner of Tony’s brain he’s reluctant to overwrite the memory of his butler by introducing his AI namesake into his territory. He’ll add it to the list of topics to bring up with his non-existent therapist.

At least here in the garden, if he hears a noise, he’s not wondering where the fuck it came from. There are birds, squirrels, traffic from the far side of the wall. He’s pretty sure there’s a couple of stray cats hanging out in the rose bushes next to the garage. The deathlike hush inside the house’d had him prowling outside Bruce’s room, listening for indications that he was about to wake up. Not because he’s worried; he’d just like some fucking company if he’s going to be stranded here for God knows how long. 

It’s been hours. Maybe Tony should wake Bruce up. Sleeping too much, probably a bad sign. Unless it’s a good sign. He’s not exactly clear on what’s wrong with Bruce, physically. Natasha had threatened to do horrible things to him if he went looking through Bruce’s medical records without permission. What he does know is that Hulking out resets Bruce’s physical condition to baseline. But Bruce hasn’t transformed since the rescue. Not even during, when Tony flew him out of the compound amidst covering fire from Ross’s illegal mercenary guards.

Maybe that’s a good thing too. They haven’t really talked about it.

In any case, the sun is going down, and Tony is hungry, and fuck eating alone. That shit’s just depressing. 

Tony never did have that drink. He’s regretting that about now.

He slips quietly through the pantry door, scrapes the grass off his shoes on the door mat, and treads softly through the kitchen. His steps slow as he rounds the corner towards Bruce’s door.

Is Bruce…snoring?

Tony presses his ear to the door. He hears shallow, tortured breathing. Like Bruce developed a nasty bronchial infection in the last two hours. 

That can’t be good. Tony taps twice, then pushes the door open.

The light from the hallway falls on the bed, illuminating Bruce’s supine body. He’s still dressed, minus his shoes, lying on top of the blankets without so much as a throw to cover him.

As Tony draws closer, he sees that Bruce’s eyes are open. His head doesn’t turn, but his gaze lights on Tony, and the pattern of his breathing changes: still shallow, but faster, panting, like he’s trying to get Tony’s attention.

Tony is across the room in a second, grasping Bruce’s shoulders and pulling him upright. He uses a little too much force—the guy weighs about as much as a sack of dried leaves—and Bruce gasps, loud and hot against Tony’s ear. He collapses against Tony’s chest, and Tony lets his hand rest between the sharp points of Bruce’s shoulder blades before easing him back.

Bruce lifts his hand, slowly, like he’s surprised he can still do that. Then he grabs Tony’s wrist and looks at him.

It’s the kind of look Tony might have expected when he first pulled Bruce out of that cell, dazed and disbelieving. Except he’d barely opened his eyes back then.

“Tony,” he whispers.

Tony swallows. “Yeah, it’s me. Uh…nightmare?”

“I don’t...” Bruce shakes his head, slowly. His grip doesn’t loosen. “I think...sleep paralysis.”

“Oh shit.” Tony’s heard of that. Some late night documentary when he’d run through all the horror flicks on his queue. But better than a nightmare, right? More boogeymen, less flashbacks to recent trauma. “What did I interrupt, some kind of alien abduction? Anal probe? C’mon, you can tell me.”

Bruce doesn’t laugh. He’s staring over Tony’s shoulder into an empty corner of the room. It goes on for so long that Tony’s back starts to itch.

Finally, Bruce lets go of Tony’s arm and rubs at his eyes. “Can you hand me my glasses?”

Tony knows better than to think he’s going to get answers if Bruce doesn’t feel like giving them up. He reaches for the folded pair of glasses next to the bedside lamp and hands them over.

Then, he does what he always does when he can’t handle vulnerability. He starts talking.

“Glad you’re up anyway, I’m starving. You want to order dinner? I’d do it myself, but after a year of catering to Steve’s metabolism, I’ve forgotten how much two normal people eat.” 

Bruce glances at Tony’s tablet, the dim glow of the LED screen marking where Tony had flung it onto the end of the bed. His mouth twitches. 

“Normal people?” he says. “You mean…us?”

Tony puts his hand on his chest, coincidentally covering the scar where the reactor used to be. “What? We’re normal. We’re…you know what, never mind.” He grabs the tablet and tosses it onto Bruce’s lap. “Pick something. Anything but Indian. Natasha and I ate take-out from Tandoori Kitchen next to the hospital like, every night last week. I’m still having chili farts.”

“Can it wait a minute? I need a shower.”

Tony nods solemnly. “ _Awesome_ idea.” He holds up his hands defensively. “I wasn’t going to say anything, but…” He wrinkles his nose.

It feels like a victory when Bruce fixes him with an unamused look and thrusts the tablet into his chest. He climbs out of the bed and makes his way stiffly out of the room.

“Extra strength bodywash is in the second dispenser,” Tony calls after him.

When Tony follows a second later, he pauses slightly at the door. In the corner, where Bruce had been staring, there was nothing. Nothing at all. 

*

Tony orders dinner himself from the best reviewed vegetarian restaurant in Manhattan. The restaurant doesn’t do delivery, but Tony bribes the owner to bring cartons of fresh fruit, spicy vegetable stir fry, and risotto to the kitchen door in a cab. 

Tony can eat anything, but the goal is to get Bruce to actually finish a meal for once.

The shower runs for a long time. Tony figures Bruce is just appreciating the water pressure. He’s probably been bathing out of buckets since January.

When the food arrives, he slaps some plates and silverware onto the table in the breakfast nook and arranges the cartons buffet style along the island. Bruce looks suitably impressed when he finally wanders out of the bathroom, combing his fingers back through his damp hair.

Tony shrugs. “We can eat in here, or there’s a…thing, a gazebo, out back. If you’re into outdoor dining.”

Bruce lifts the lid on the risotto and inhales the steam that rises up. Wordlessly, he fills a plate and carries it back to the table. Right, Tony forgot—eating outdoors probably was probably more of a necessity than a luxury to Bruce.

They’re both quiet as they eat. If Bruce notices that the food is more suited to his tastes than Tony’s, he doesn’t mention it. Tony keeps on eye on Bruce’s plate. A few forkfuls make it down the hatch, but it isn’t long before he’s just pushing food around.

Eventually, Tony scoots back from the table, rolling his neck until it cracks. “Want that tour now?” he says, nice and casual.

Bruce looks up from his plate, surprised. Then he nods.

They start in the gallery. Tony plumbs his memory for whatever random fragments of information about the Hudson Valley painters he retained from listening to his mother. He pauses in front of a Bierstadt that she’d been especially attached to.

His fingers brush the edge of the frame, and he can practically hear her scolding him, _don’t touch_. Story of his life.

Bruce looks at him instead of at the painting. “You have an art collection too, right?” 

“Yeah. Lost a bunch of it with the Malibu house.” He shrugged. “Not your thing?”

“I don’t know much about it.”

“Me neither, but art dealers never seem to mind all that much.”

They pass through the foyer next, then into the formal dining room. The cleaners had left the immense table draped in its dust cloths. “Get a running start and you can slide most of the way down it in your socks,” Tony observes.

The door to the library, set into the east wall of the dining room, has been left standing open. As they enter, their footsteps go silent against the thick carpeting. Tony falls back, watches as Bruce cranes his head, raking the towering shelves with his eyes.

It’s impressive, Tony guesses. The library had been Howard’s domain. Like the foyer, and the dining room, it’s designed to stun. Everything from the leather chairs, to the fireplace, to the drinks cabinet, to the sheer fucking ridiculousness of the book collection, has been calculated for effect. 

Tony had never been welcome here, and even though he knows Bruce can’t help it, he likes him a tiny bit less for falling for Howard’s schtick.

He wanders over to the fireplace as Bruce begins running his fingers over book spines, leaning in close to examine titles. That’s when he notices that the drink decanters have been topped up.

By the time Bruce comes to join him, Tony is already pouring his second drink.

“I hid a bottle of scotch in a shelf when I was home on vacation from boarding school. It’s still here. I checked.” Tony raises his glass to Bruce and knocks it back. 

Bruce pushes his glasses up his nose. “How old were you?”

“Uh, I left for MIT the next semester, so…thirteen.”

He feels Bruce looking at him. Not with pity, or even much in the way of interest. More like Tony is just another dataset waiting to get sucked into the maw of his massive, dispassionate intellect.

“Why do you keep it?” Bruce says, and Tony is on the verge of asking him if he has any idea how long it would take to pack up this many fucking books, and then Bruce says, “The house.”

The question, or maybe just the matter-of-fact way Bruce says it, makes Tony want to say something vicious in reply. Instead, he pours his third drink. “Easier than getting rid of it?”

“You weren’t happy here.”

He sets the decanter down a little harder than he means to.

Tony doesn’t make friends with other geniuses as a rule. Rhodey, Pepper, they’re highly intelligent people, but compared to Tony they can’t quite keep pace. Not and have energy left over for other things, anyway.

He’d sort of thought all geniuses were pretty much assholes, like Howard and him. Then he’d met Bruce, gentle and patient right up until the moment he leaves you in the dust with no warning except for an apologetic smile.

The devastating thing about Bruce is that he’s so sharp, you don’t even feel the cut until he’s exposed you down to the bone. 

The silence that follows seems to unnerve them both. Tony looks into his glass and thinks about getting ice. Bruce shifts his weight from foot to foot, then turns over a glass and reaches for the decanter. He handles the crystal a little clumsily, like its weight is unfamiliar in his hands.

“You don’t drink.” Tony is so startled that it comes out almost accusingly.

“Not normally, no.” 

Bruce dumps a double measure into the tumbler, then carries it over to one of Howard’s massive leather wingback chairs. It’s the kind of chair that wraps you in buttery soft arms and rocks you to sleep, but Bruce perches on the edge of the seat like it’s a bed of nails.

Maybe Tony had been wrong about how susceptible Bruce was to Howard’s blandishments. He follows Bruce to the fireplace and draws up the chair opposite, leaning back into its embrace.

He’s about to say something that he knows Bruce won’t like, and he honest-to-God doesn’t know if it’s because he needs to say it, or because he owes Bruce for picking at his scabs. Either way, here goes nothing.

“So I’ve been thinking.” Tony gives into the cliché and studies the rim of his glass. “Precautionary measures. We should take some.”

Bruce blinks. “I don’t, uh…”

He trails off. Tony glances over, and, shit. Bruce is grey.

“You’re safe here,” he says quickly. “JARVIS runs mansion security, and Clint volunteered to do a perimeter sweep every night.” He averts his eyes. “I meant for when you leave again.”

He was sort of expecting Bruce to get quiet at that. So far, so good.

But then Bruce clears his throat. And in that soft, halting voice Tony used to find so charmingly diffident, he says, “Do you want me to leave?”

And honestly, he knows what Bruce is like, but that takes the fucking cake. 

Practically since the day they met, Tony has been throwing himself heart and soul into the Bruce Banner Project: time, money, resources, whatever it took, he didn’t care. He was going to make a place in the world where Bruce could be safe, where he could get what he needed, do the work he was born to do. 

He wasn’t looking for thanks. He just wanted to be guy who showed Bruce that he could have nice things for once in his life.

But Tony is starting to think that’s never going to work for Bruce. That he’s never going to settle in and just live his fucking life. Because the second he starts to adjust, the second he stops reacting with disbelief every time somebody dares to be nice to him, he gets spooked and runs away. Even though he knows he’s just going to get hurt. Even though Tony’s going to bring him home again, every time, and then sit back and wait for the whole fucking nightmare cycle to start over.

Bruce is so fucking _smart._ The fact that he can be that smart, and still look at Tony and say shit like _“Do you want me to leave?”_ , after all the times Tony’s _begged him_ to stay—

Tony gets it. He does. It isn’t Bruce’s fault that he’s like this. But sometimes, Tony is honestly at a loss as to what he’s even doing here.

But he can’t confront Bruce with any of this, because he’s so goddamn self-loathing that he’ll just nod sadly and agree that he’s acting like a jerk, and then he’ll go hide in a hole so deep Tony will never be able find him again. 

He’s not sure if it’s the scotch that’s burning through his gut or the Hulk-sized ulcer he’s probably working on. 

“Okay,” says Bruce. “The staring is getting weird.” 

“Sorry. Lost my train of thought. Where were we?” 

If Bruce repeats himself, Tony is going to finish his drink and then eat the glass.

“Uh, precautionary measures.”

“Right. For when you run off to…wherever it is you go when you aren’t enjoying the hospitality of rogue divisions of the U.S. army. I would point out that you don’t _have_ to go anywhere, but unlike certain fictional 80’s AI systems, I understand the concept of futility. So let’s talk damage limitation.” Tony spreads his hands. “We could chip you.”

“You are not putting a chip in me.” 

“I say ‘chip’, but it’s really more of a filament. Nanofilament. Undetectable, floats along in your bloodstream. Doesn’t show up on scanners, can only be tracked by me, or whoever I key into the algorithm. If you’d had it last time, we’d have found you in like, a day.”

Bruce is looking at the floor, but his neck and shoulder muscles are tense, his nostrils slightly flared. Anyone else would take the warning and back off, but it makes Tony want to cheer. He’ll take pissed-off Bruce over intractably self-destructive Bruce any day.

“Okay. You don’t like my ideas, let’s hear some of yours. You must have thought about it.”

Bruce adjusts his grip on his glass. Then, like he’s only just remembered why he’s holding it, he takes a drink. Then another, until the glass is empty. Tiny little sips, like he never did shots in his life.

“Seriously, Bruce, how do you see this ending? You know, I’m surprised Hulk hasn’t taken matters into his own hands by now. Ross keeps gunning for him and you just keep giving it up. It’s like you want to end up with no alternative but smashing your way out of the situation.”

There’s something unbearable about watching Bruce not react to things. Restraint doesn’t sit naturally on him. But then, Tony guesses, that’s the whole point.

“Where _is_ your greener half these days, anyway? You look like you could use some Hulk-style minty refreshment. Put the color back in your cheeks.”

“Tony.”

“Yes, pumpkin?”

“You’re not going to…manipulate me into agreeing to a chip.”

Tony feels the blood rush to his face, hot and stinging, as if from a blow. 

The problem with Bruce Banner is that after more than a year of Tony busting his ass to prove himself, Bruce’s trust in him is still at about the same level as the day they met. 

“Is that what you think I was doing? Manipulating you?” Tony sucks air between his teeth. “I guess that explains a lot.”

He looks to his left, towards the empty fireplace. Something hot and thick pulses in his chest, a familiar pressure that tastes like helplessness.

When he hears Bruce stand up and walk out of the room a moment later, he doesn’t say a word.


End file.
